Monday, 2 March 2015

Take Your Box Camera To Work Day 2015

Kodak No.2 Brownie with Rollei RPX 400

For this year's Take Your Box Camera To Work Day last Friday, I used a different camera to previous years. I had recently bought a cheap Kodak No.2 Brownie, with the intention of making this into a film slitter. I did temporarily use this as a means to cut down film, for this January's 127 Day, but after cleaning the Brownie, and finding it to be in good working condition, I decided to use it for shooting. Composing the shots was rather down to guesswork, as between the two brilliant finders, there was one loose mirror which had lost most of its silvering, with the result that very little showed on the small ground glass finder. I shot three rolls of Rollei RPX400, two of which were developed in Ilfotec LC29, and one in RO9 One Shot. As it was a sunny day, the interior photographs with sunlight in were shot on the instant setting, while others were shot for a number of seconds on 'time', and the latitude of RPX400 made up for the wide variations in exposure. When scanning I realised that the negatives had been scratched, which I thought may have been while advancing the film in the camera, or possibly in handling them after washing, and some of the worst scratches have been mitigated digitally.